PONTE VEDRA, Fla.  A $300 million Russian telecommunications satellite launched Aug. 18 disappeared from the view of ground controllers and the U.S. space surveillance network along with the rocket upper stage that carried it into orbit, according to industry officials and the Russian space agency, Roscosmos.

More than 24 hours after the 5,800-kilogram Express-AM4 satellite separated from the Proton rocket's Breeze-M upper stage, neither object could be found, officials said. The U.S. Space Surveillance Network of ground radars was tracking a single object that one official said was neither the Breeze-M nor the Express-AM4, but rather an auxiliary propellant tank from the Proton rocket.

But by mid-day Eastern Daylight Time Aug. 19, the U.S. Space Surveillance Network had located the Express-AM4 satellite, saying it was in an orbit with an apogee of 20,317 kilometers, a perigee of 1,007 kilometers and an inclination relative to the equator of 51.3 degrees. One industry official said it would be difficult, from this position, to maneuver Express-AM4 into operational position in geostationary orbit with sufficient life remaining to make the effort worthwhile.

1. A $300 million Russian telecommunications satellite probably paid for by dumb-ass U.S. taxpayers.
2. Got lost in space for a brief moment until dumb-ass U.S. taxpayer radar system tracked it in the wrong orbit leading to. . .
3. The conclusion that Russian technology is far superior to anything the dumb-ass U.S. taxpayer could ever achieve.
4. Hiel Obama!

“Express-AM4, built by Astrium Satellites of Europe with input from Russian industry, is a Eurostar 3000 satellite frame carrying 63 active transponders in Ku-, C-, L- and Ka-band. The two Ka-band transponders will be satellite fleet operator RSCCs first use of Ka-band for broadband communications links.”

American industry has had failed satellite launches and failed birds as well.

Poop happens. Most “poop” in the satellite industry happens between launch and stabilization in geosynch orbit. There’s lots of stuff that has to go correctly to get the bird into final orbit:

1. Launch.
2. Get to geosync transfer orbit, which is an elliptic orbit.
3. Fire the AKM (apogee kick motor) to circularize the orbit.
4. Perform station keeping thrusting to finalize the ‘parking’ of the bird into the desired ‘slot’.

I got a taste of what can go wrong when I interned for RCA in the 80’s. We had a replacement bird that had been launched a few months prior, was allowed to ‘settle’ a bit, and it was drifting just out of it’s station. The spacecraft analysts performed a stationkeeping thrust burn to knock it east/south in the “box” and poof! The telemetry disappeared. Just freakin’ disappeared. Poof.

You should have seen how ashen people’s faces got. Back then, it was insured too... but there was only one underwriter and they were going to have a problem eating the entire loss. The insurance company would have had to pay out on not only the satellite, but also on 10 years’ of expected revenue... as the bird’s transponders were already sold going forward for at least 5 years, and there was a backlog of traffic coming online.

We had to go to raw audio from the radios (most all telemetry has a lot of computers and processing between the radio and what you see on the screen) to hear the thin, faded signal from the bird cycle across the receiver every 90 seconds or so... we had no idea what was going on. We were pretty sure it didn’t blow up because we were still hearing *something* on the specific frequency at that specific point in space... but the burn was so regular, so mundane, we couldn’t fathom what the heck happened.

After three days of intense orbital mechanics computations and telemetry sleuthing (which required copying signals on paper with a stopwatch and hand-decoding the data), the engineering team determined that the bird was tumbling end-over-end, and that one of the solar arrays had folded up.

Long story short, controllers loaded commands into the radios by hand, did a quick series of burns to stop the tumbling, re-orient the bird so we had the main antennas pointed back at earth and then set about finding out “WTF happened?!”

Turns out that after the AKM fired to put the bird into orbit, both the main gyro and the backup gyro were both spun up. The bird was in a meta-stable configuration... and all it needed was a little shove and suddenly the gyroscopic forces from having an extra gyro spun up made the bird go into a tumbling motion far faster than designers had though possible - which was why the solar array folded in on itself.

Many years ago, a friend of mine spent years as part of a team assembling a low-Earth-orbit communications satellite. Less than a minute after launch, the satellite ended up in the Pacific Ocean instead of in orbit. It is a devastating thing to happen after putting in so much effort.

14
posted on 08/19/2011 10:09:22 PM PDT
by Zeppo
("Happy Pony is on - and I'm NOT missing Happy Pony")

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